Anthemius of Tralles

person · earth · Asia Minor and Constantinople

A mathematician and mechanician from Tralles in Asia Minor who, with Isidore of Miletus, designed Hagia Sophia for Justinian I from 532. Contemporary sources describe both men in terms of geometry and mechanics rather than of building craft - Procopius calls Anthemius a mechanikos - and the design reads accordingly: the pendentive solution and the longitudinal half-domes are geometric answers to a stated problem rather than developments of an existing building type. Anthemius also wrote on conic sections and on burning mirrors, and mathematical works attributed to him survive in fragments. He died before the first dome fell in 558; the rebuilding was directed by Isidore's nephew, Isidore the Younger. That the architects of the most structurally ambitious building of late antiquity were geometers rather than masons is one of the more revealing facts about how it came to exist.